Goal-oriented Navigation Instruction Generation with Tour Video Priors

Abstract

Navigation Instruction Generation (NIG) aims to produce step-by-step natural language instructions for navigation guidance. Existing studies primarily treat NIG as an auxiliary task for vision-andlanguage navigation (VLN), focusing on data augmentation or multi-task learning. However, generating navigation instructions from compact environmental priors requires meticulous spatial reasoning, especially when the target route does not simply follow the demonstrated tour, and remains challenging for current multimodal models. In this work, we introduce VideoNIG, a goal-oriented video-grounded NIG task that generates navigation instructions from ego-centric tour videos, an initial observation, and a textual or visual goal, without relying on intermediate representations such as graphs and maps. We instantiate VideoNIG in a controlled simulator benchmark with 60K tour videos across continuous indoor environments and 37K multimodal prompts with progressive difficulty levels. We further introduce a diagnostic evaluation protocol that combines text similarity, choice-based spatial consistency tests, and downstream navigation execution. To address this task, we propose a two-stage Curriculum Learning framework that decomposes the learning into foundational motion perception and long-horizon navigation reasoning. Specifically, we first employ Action Warmup for spatial action-view alignment, followed by Complexity Progression using trajectories with increasing exploratory difficulty. Extensive experiments show that existing MLLMs struggle with VideoNIG, while our approach significantly improves instruction quality across complementary diagnostic metrics. Finally, integrating VideoNIG-generated instructions with a VLN agent demonstrates the executability of this task formulation for end-to-end navigation.